The Escort was introduced in the United Kingdom at the end of 1967 and made its show debut at the Brussels Motor Show in January 1968, replacing the long-running Ford Anglia. It was notable as the first passenger car developed by the newly merged Ford of Europe, with production beginning at the Halewood plant in England and at a facility in Genk, Belgium for left-hand-drive markets. Continental production later transferred to Saarlouis in West Germany.
The Escort used conventional rear-wheel drive in its first two generations, with MacPherson strut front suspension and a live rear axle. It was the first small Ford to use rack-and-pinion steering. The switch to front-wheel drive came with the third-generation Mk.3 in 1980.
The Mark I Escort became one of the most successful rally cars of its era. The Ford works team dominated international rallying in the late 1960s and early 1970s using Escort-based competition machinery. Its greatest single victory came in the 1970 London to Mexico World Cup Rally, driven by Finland's Hannu Mikkola and Swedish co-driver Gunnar Palm. This win gave rise to the Escort Mexico, a special-edition road car with a 1,598 cc crossflow engine and strengthened bodyshell, of which 10,352 Mk.1 examples were built.
Two further performance variants were developed at Ford's Advanced Vehicle Operations facility in South Essex. The RS1600 used a 1,601 cc Cosworth BDA engine with a 16-valve head, while the RS2000 offered a 2.0-litre Pinto overhead-cam unit as a more accessible alternative. The earlier Escort Twin Cam, built for Group 2 international rallying, used a Lotus-developed twin-camshaft head on a 1,558 cc block, and was most famously raced by Australian Frank Gardner who won the 1968 British Saloon Car Championship driving one.
The squarer-styled Mark II appeared in January 1975, sharing the core structure of the Mk.1 but developed jointly between Ford of Britain and Ford of Germany. It continued the Escort's dominant run in rallying with even greater success. The Mk.2 won the RAC Rally every year from 1975 to 1979.
The key competition model was the RS1800, built specifically for rallying with a naturally aspirated 1,833 cc Cosworth BDE DOHC engine producing 117 PS in road trim. Works rally versions used progressively developed BDE and BDG engines, with the 2.0-litre aluminium-block BDG delivering up to 250 bhp by 1979. The RS1800 was re-homologated on 2 April 1977 as the 1,975 cc Group 4 Escort RS following changes to FIA Appendix J regulations.
In the 1979 World Rally Championship season, Björn Waldegård won the drivers' title in an Escort RS1800, with Hannu Mikkola finishing second and Ari Vatanen fifth. Their collective performances gave Ford the manufacturers' championship — the only time Ford won this title until 2006. Ari Vatanen won the WRC drivers' title again in 1981, still at the wheel of a Mk.2 RS1800, a remarkable achievement given the arrival of the four-wheel-drive Audi Quattro that year.
Codenamed Erika, the third-generation Escort launched in September 1980 and represented a fundamental engineering departure from its predecessors, adopting front-wheel drive, a new hatchback body, and overhead-camshaft CVH engines. The Mk.3 was voted European Car of the Year in 1981 and overtook the Cortina as Britain's best-selling car by 1982, a position it held for eight years.
Ford initially attempted to carry the Escort's rallying success into the new generation with the RS 1700T, a rear-wheel-drive prototype for Group B competition based on the Mk.3 bodyshell but using a Cosworth 1.8-litre turbocharged engine producing over 300 bhp. Persistent development problems and concern within Ford's marketing department that a rear-wheel-drive Escort would be seen as a step backward led to the project being cancelled. Ford instead developed the purpose-built, all-wheel-drive RS200.
Performance road variants of the Mk.3 included the XR3, the fuel-injected XR3i, and the turbocharged RS Turbo. The fourth generation, launched in March 1986, was a significant facelift of the Erika platform rather than an all-new design.
The fifth-generation Escort arrived in September 1990 on the new CE-14 platform, with a simplified torsion beam rear suspension and an improved aerodynamic body. The early 1992 Escort RS Cosworth — built on a modified Sierra Cosworth floorplan and clothed in Escort bodywork — served as Ford's top-level homologation special, using a turbocharged 2.0-litre Cosworth engine producing 225 PS and featuring four-wheel drive. Though mechanically distinct from the regular Escort, it remained a factory rally challenger.
The sixth-generation facelift in January 1995 updated the exterior and interior substantially. Production of the standard Escort ended at Halewood in July 2000, replaced by the Ford Focus. The panel van variant continued until October 2002, and Escort-based cars were manufactured in Argentina until 2004.
The Ford Escort's motorsport record across its first two generations stands as one of the most decorated in rally history. Its works victories in the WRC, combined with accessibility in road-going RS and Mexico forms, made it an icon of 1970s performance motoring in Europe. The Mk.2 RS1800 in particular remains one of the most celebrated competition cars of the pre-turbo era and continues to be a sought-after vehicle in historic rallying.